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Why Everyone Should Hate Cellphone Carriers
The Byelorrusian Spamtrap writes "Wired Magazine's made its position clear on the state of play in America's cellular industry, delivering a long, satisfying screed on why all of us should stop complaining and do something about it. 'They own politicians - Sure, it's just phones. In a world where worse things happen all the time amid the muck and despair of human existence, having to pay for premium text is hardly worth worrying about, is it? You can (and should) opt out, and not sign on the dotted line to begin with. But today's cell towers might be tomorrow's Pony Express: they're TV stations, internet access, emergency 911 and news networks all rolled into one. WWAN could well end up supplanting copper sooner than anyone expects: do you want these companies in charge of it?'"
In a world where worse things happen all the time amid the muck and despair of human existence, having to pay for premium text is hardly worth worrying about, is it?
That depends. Are you paris hilton? If yes, then yes.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Let me get this straight... polticians are corrupt, so we shouldn't buy cellphones? Am I reading that correctly? Politicians are corrupt... so in response... we punish ourselves by not using a very convenient technology. Are we really that apathetic? Is that what this country has come to?
HOW ABOUT PUNISH THE POLITCIANS!? I'm so sick of people repeatedly voting in incumbents, then whining about how things never change, and they're just all so corrupt. Vote for an independent, hell, write in yourself, but don't whine that you'd just be *wasting a vote*, and continue to support people who are not serving you! Then tell people they should live the life of a hermit to *stick it to the man*. It is NOT the corporations fault that they attempt to maximize profits. That is the job of a public company. Our government allowing them to do so through shady practices is a problem with the GOVERNMENT!
Since a lot of those same reasons can apply to ISPs and other companies in general, I propose we just hate all corporations whose profit margins are above 1 million annually. If we can assume that money corrupts, I think it's fair to say that any company in excess of $1,000,000.00 has doing something wrong to somebody on their way to that point. This blanket hatred will make it easier for me to keep track of what companies I do and don't like.
today's cell towers might be tomorrow's Pony Express
Probably not. While an exciting and deadly ride for its employees, the Pony Express was an abysmal failure as a business. It went bankrupt in just a matter of months as I recall. I see the cell phone companies neither providing exciting, deadly rides nor going out of business in a hurry.
I doubt carriers could suddenly gain control over all of these things, but it is something that needs to be avoided, however it may happen. The real reasons that would be a problem lie in their customer relations practices.
A billing error that can't be fixed at local stores, and the subscriber is forced to lead resolution of the issue while waiting on hold for 10 minutes every time an attempt is made, then arguing with customer "service" to convince them a problem exists. (AT&T)
Quality of tech support is laughable - I was told by a tech supervisor that data transfer on my phone was very expensive because the screen was large. Not just physically, but it had a high resolution too. (Cingular)
Salespeople lying directly to customers about plan availability when a similar plan with higher commission is available. (T-Mobile)
Seriously... how can you have a segment on "They have annoying commercials", and not even mention ATT/Cingular's "idk my bff [name]" commercials? They have the dubious honor of being some of the only commercials (Axe being the other one, for the curious) to make me feel like my iq was lowered just by watching it.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yeah, I think cell phone companies in America suck. What am I supposed to do about it? The author suggests not owning a phone at all. Well, I guess I would do that if I could get a land line. But wait, those are owned by the same companies. The only alternative is phone service through a cable/satellite company, but those companies are just as corrupt and dreadful as the cell phone companies (and in a lot of cases worse). Hell, the state of broadband in America is 100x worse than the state of cell phones, and there is literally nothing we can do about that. Cutting yourself off from the phone companies (a lesser evil) just bolsters cable/satellite companies (a greater evil). The only real solution is some sort of uprising. First senator that gets the ball rolling on fixing broadband (making it comparable to the rest of the world) gets my write-in vote for president.
Such futures can't be relied upon if innovation is permitted So, no company should invest heavily in innovation because that stifles progress. Check.
The remaining [author couldn't be bothered to count] reasons are similarly kvetching and dripping with angst.
Has anyone considered that the excessively long voicemail introductions used by almost every cell carrier amount to conspired gouging? We pay airtime when we are leaving a voicemail, right? When you get voicemail on my cell you get my brief away message, followed by the phone company's useless 20-second blather. For example:
ring... ring... ring... (me):"Hello, I'm not here right now, please leave a message" (sprint): "To leave a voice message press 1, or just wait for the tone. To send a numeric page press 2 now. At the tone please leave a voice message. When you are finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options"
Several gripes here.
1) 20 seconds of instructions doesn't sound like that much on its own. But if that pushes your phone call to roll one minute longer it's a minute of possible airtime charge the phone company gets. You start paying the minute the call is answered, even leaving voicemail.
2) A typical voicemail message is probably 2 minutes or less. The phone company's instructional message here is taking up a significant portion of that airtime.
3) These instructions are ridiculous and seem to be there only to draw out the duration of the call. They couldn't be phrased more verbosely. Oh, I can hang up when the message is done? I didn't know that. I can press pound for more options? How about you tell me about those AFTER I've left a message.
4) The features are really ridiculous, too, and I suspect some 1% even use them. Send a numeric page? Why the hell should I do that? Cellphones have caller ID already. Send a FAX?? Please Slashdotters tell me who has sent a FAX over a cellphone. Do you have to make the modem sounds with your voice? If anyone DOES use these features they probably don't need the help message to remember what button to press to initiate their cellphone fax.
5) There is no option to turn these messages off. They probably also require you to add your own greeting. Resulting in a totally redundant 30-second prelude to leaving any voicemail.
6) Every mobile company I know of has these messages, some worse than others. Is this an unspoken or conspired arrangement between the mobile carriers? Sprint doesn't necessarily make money when someone has to listen to their God-awful pre-message, but they might. They certainly will make money when my Sprint phone is waiting on Verizon's equally obnoxious introduction, or T-mobile's, etc...
7) The worst part of this, in my perspective, isn't that I might pay, if I totally screw up, 50c or 5 bucks some month because a few extra minutes were incurred waiting to leave my friends voicemail - or dropping coffee on the bus trying to press 1 to bypass the spiel. The worst part is I leave a moderate amount of voicemail messages, and this amounts to Minutes, Hours, or God knows, even Days of my life eventually wasted listening to a robot tell me how to leave a voicemail and that it's ok to hang up. It's robbery, I tell you!
Today: Anonymous prepaid
- buy a pre-activated T-mobile 2 Go SIM off of ebay
- buy an unlocked GSM phone off ebay
No contracts, no fees, no lame choice of stupid phones, nobody knows who you are or how to hassle you. You put minutes on the SIM card and that's that.
This is the "plan" my wife and I have been on since May. Works nicely. Some friends just asked me to set them up with the same deal, since they were sick of paying $90/mo for a set of phones they barely used.
Tomorrow:
Replace handset you bought in "step A" wth an openMoko device. My next handset will hopefully be 100% open-source. I can get partway there with the P2k tools and what not for Motorola, but a truly open device just makes it all that much easier.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The REAL question we should be asking is why are none of the companies willing to step up and offer better, cheaper plans? In a free market, we would have the same plans (if not better) as the Europeans do. Businesses undercut each other in a free market in order to steal customers. So why are no cell phone companies doing this? Don't we have laws that are supposed to prevent companies from banding together to screw the consumer? I was under the assumption that price-fixing was against the law (and is clearly what's going on; the cell phone companies have agreed to offer minimal features for similar prices, so everyone gets part of the pie without any real competition)
Bah, I've been an advocate of "sharing the love" for a long time.
Buy a Broadband connection, then put a WIFI router on your main router's DMZ and let the folks know that service might be intermittent, but they can hit that router for (or negotiate a group rate with friends and neighbors, you maintain the power bill and the hardware and keep the big public WIFI router on a DMZ, etc.)
If every neighbor in the area with broadband provides a WIFI network (I even put up a SQUID cache server in the old days) you can actually provide "municipal" wifi without needing the government to get involved.
If you get to KNOW your neighbors before letting them have the WIFI WPA access key, then you can truly "secure" your network by knowing, A, who's logged in, and B, whom it is that you're sharing your data with.
And technically, you can do whatever you damn please with the connection, especially if you run a cache server to keep things clear. Discussing other features (such as data retention policy or lack thereof, etc, will help keep things honest...) I have known of NO endeavors ever done by big corporations (child of government) or the government itself that has EVER been honest, whether here in North America, or anywhere else.
To believe that gov'co ever does ANYTHING without having ulterior motives, is to be starkly and childishly naive.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler